The Doctor Who Switch Experience

While I haven't played every Doctor Who game that has released since I got into the show back in 2005, I've played a decent amount of them. During the Matt Smith era, The Adventure Games were pretty good (I enjoyed them enough to replay them and write a guide), but the paired DS and Wii titles - Evacuation Earth and Return to Earth - were bad. Real bad. I'm not even sure how I finished Return to Earth after a bug meant the game camera was in a completely different room to the one I was blindly navigating.

For Christmas, I was gifted another 2 Doctor Who games in the form of the Duo Bundle for Switch. The Edge of Reality is a console / PC port of the VR game The Edge of Time, and The Lonely Assassins was a game I hadn't even heard of until I saw this collection existed. It turns out it was originally a mobile game released in 2021 that acted as a sequel to a critically acclaimed episode from 2007.

The Lonely Assassins can be completed in around 2 hours. There is the potential for replay value in choosing different dialogue options, and, if you didn't scour every available piece of information, going back and doing so will allow you to view a "secret" ending. Although it wasn't so secret to me as I just so happened to fulfil the unlock conditions during my playthrough.

The player comes into possession of a mobile phone that belongs to a character from the 2007 episode Blink, and is immediately contacted by Osgood, a recurring character from the show introduced in 2013. Osgood instructs the player to dig through the phone for clues as to why the phone's owner has disappeared.

This involves looking through the messages, which is what triggered my realisation of who this character was, as well as emails, a select number of websites in the browser, and the photo gallery. Contacts are also available, and seeing the name of a character from the spin-off show The Sarah Jane Adventures listed within the contacts excited me more than anything else in the game.

Parts of the phone are inaccessible as the data has corrupted, and some of these can be scanned and sent to Osgood, as well as select messages or images which can be uploaded as clues. As Osgood processes the information sent to her, she is able to provide access to some of the corrupted data which in turn allows more clues to be found.

Communicating with Osgood suffers slightly from having to choose from a list of options which only lets you progress when the game wants you to. You might have noticed how one clue connects to a previous one, but a lot of the time you have to wait for Osgood to get a few lines in before the game decides you can make that connection. Although it is nowhere near as bad as Detective Pikachu, which forces you round the houses before it lets you select an answer you worked out ages ago.

A button at the top of the screen reveals a notification bar which lists objectives, which came in particularly useful when I had only found 4 bits of information out of the 5 I needed to access a website. It doesn't outright give you the answer, but suggests which part of the phone you need to look at.

Later on videos are unlocked, and unfortunately I encountered an issue where a video did not start and I could not back out to attempt to restart it. Fortunately this worked after reloading the game, and it didn't happen in any subsequent videos.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anybody who has not watched Doctor Who, and even those that have would benefit from a knowledge of the Weeping Angels to follow the story. To truly appreciate this game though, you need to be familiar with Series 1-7 of Doctor Who, in particular the episode Blink, as well as knowledge of The Sarah Jane Adventures. There are references to some of Jodie Whittaker's adventures as well. While most of Osgood's character development came from series 8 and 9, having seen those isn't really necessary.

Despite its short length, The Lonely Assassins would likely start to outstay its welcome if it went on for much longer. One of the nice things about it is that it's not pushy - it gives players time to look through everything at their own pace, which unfortunately cannot be said for The Edge of Reality.

I actually started The Edge of Reality first but after failing to find the solution to one of the first puzzles, and hearing Jodie spout the same 2 lines at least a dozen times, I jumped over to the other game.

During my initial 10 minute stint stuck in the launderette at the start, I was shocked to see how low resolution the textures were. It makes Pokémon Scarlet and Violet look like a masterpiece, and those games were severely technically incompetent. An early objective is to find the code to open a safe, and this requires picking up and inspecting items. I'd found half of the code almost straight away but finding the rest was painful.

The room is littered with useless items, and one of two audio clips pops off about once every 15 seconds where the Doctor either says some flavour text about how her companions are really good at finding clues, which is not helpful in any way, or she suggests looking around. Eventually I was able to find the second clue by opening a drawer that appeared to be empty, then repositioning myself to the side to discover it actually had an item inside it.

Once outside, Dalek ships in the sky popped in and out of existence. An audio clip to tell me what to do next ended up triggering before I'd even made it through the maze of storage containers where it would have been relevant. And the Doctor told me to hurry up and get inside the TARDIS, even though I was already been inside and she had just welcomed me in.

Before I got into the TARDIS, I had to solve a puzzle which involved taking out a Dalek. In doing so, the Dalek delivered what felt like a Shakespearean monologue in the most un-Dalek like bit of dialogue I've ever heard. Being wordy is on point for Jodie's Doctor, but it is not a trait of the Daleks.

When the TARDIS landed at the second area, the frame-rate dropped to levels even worse than Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which was shocking on two fronts. One was that I genuinely never expected I'd play another Switch game that was a technical disaster like they are, and two was this was a VR game where frame-rates have to be good. Yes, the Switch has different specs, but this game isn't really pushing the boat.

I haven't played the original VR version of this game so I don't know if that was completely unoptimised too, or if these issues have been introduced by making it playable without a headset. Normally I don't feel mentally exhausted with a game until I'm trying to sweep for 100% or a boss fight has gone on for too long, but there was a moment less than 20 minutes in where it's possible to discover the location the player is in that, for Doctor Who fans, should be an "oh shit" moment but the only impact it had on me was "I should be excited but I'm not, and this game is to blame."

I made it a couple more levels into the game before putting it down for a month to play some other games before eventually returning to this. And almost instantly I regretted coming back. The game placed me at the beginning of the level and made me navigate back into the room that I was in, and the thought of having to spend even just a minute to do that was too much.

But I persevered. I did not care for the story and tuned most of it out. Even the bits that I did tune into made no sense in context, and some important things weren't even explained at all. The writing was atrocious, and the subtitles were all over the place. If they didn't get cut off before the audio was finished or ended up displaying well after the audio had played, they would be missing entire sentences or be littered with typos.

At one point, the annoying voice that accompanies you for the entire game when they decided they didn't want to pay Jodie to keep talking to you randomly spurts out "Where we're going, we don't need roads." There was no mention of Back to the Future before this - in fact, there was completely silence. It's just a random reference spouted completely out of the blue for no reason whatsoever.

Who signed off on that line? In fact, who signed off on this game?

In the menu there are options to change the sonic screwdriver to be the models used by previous Doctors. When lighting up, famously 9, 10 and 12's are blue, and 11's is green. Not here. They are yellow, just like 13's. I've worked on games where brand partners will flip their shit if something is ever so slightly misaligned, so light colours being completely wrong suggests to me that either the BBC brand team is not as stringent as it should be, or they decided that the rest of the game was a lost cause anyway and to let it slide.

The Daleks return later on in the game and, after spotting one, the annoying voice decided to tell me that Daleks were really deadly and I should avoid their line of sight. After she had told me how to avoid one and I was in the process of walking behind it, she then acted completely shocked that there was a Dalek right in front of me.

Whoever setup the audio clips has put them on triggers and called it a day, and not considering that some times things may be triggered out of order and to disregard anything that is no longer relevant.

At some point during this level, the player gets control of a Dalek. There was no dialogue to explain that this was going to happen - or, if there was, it was buried somewhere in the mountain of exposition - and it wasn't even obvious that it was going to happen by examining the surroundings. I walked up some stairs, didn't have time to look around before a loading screen appeared, and then suddenly found myself in control of a Dalek.

Towards the end of the game is a section where you are told to jump onto an object. Pretty straight forward game stuff.

There is no jump button.

Despite the lack of a jump button - the actual solution was to "sprint" - I managed to finish The Edge of Reality and I could not get the cartridge out of my Switch fast enough.

I'm annoyed that a game that bad was allowed to leave the studio that developed - not just once, but twice. I'm upset that once again a team have compltely botched making a game with the Doctor Who IP. And given that the next game is using NFTs, I have very little hope of there being something good again.

If there was another game that was like The Lonely Assassins that didn't lean too heavily on an episode that aired 14 years earlier, it would probably be OK. But not only does The Edge of Reality leave a massive stain on Doctor Who games, it makes me wonder if most VR games are as awful as this was.